10 (good) reasons to install iOS 14.3

Now you can plant trees when you search the web

Apple is building iOS 14.3 and the new software is expected to reach your devices soon. Here are 10 (good) reasons to install it when it ships.

Privacy Nutrition Labels

The introduction of Privacy Nutrition Labels in iOS 14.3 will be great for users, great for good developers, and bad for surveillance capitalists. Good developers will be rewarded with a badge that explains they don’t gather any data about customers, while bad developers will eventually figure out that they’ll need to make changes to their apps – and their business plans – in order to do the same. Knowledge is power and you have the right to know which apps are gathering power in the form of knowledge about, and over, you.

App Clips

You’ll now be able to launch an App Clip using those Apple-designed App Clips Codes which haven’t worked quite yet. All you need to do is point your camera at one of these codes and a stripped-down version of the app concerned will launch to provide you with the functionality you need at that time then.

ProRAW format for high-end iPhones

If you have an iPhone 12 Pro or iPhone 12 Pro Max you’ll be able to take images in Apple’s ProRAW format. This captures way more information in each image at the expense of some of the machine learning imaging improvements Apple has packed inside its devices. Images in the format can be edited in Photos.

Additional camera improvements include support for recording video at 25 fps and the capacity to mirror the front facing camera for still photos on iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus, iPhone SE, iPhone 7, iPhone 7 Plus, iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone X.

Proximity Controls for HomePod

You can make your HomePod mini play what’s playing on your iPhone using a new feature Apple calls ‘Proximity Controls’.

Fitness+

Fitness+ for Apple Watch now works with iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV (Apple Watch Series 3 and later. Video workouts added each week in ten popular workout types: High Intensity Interval Training, Indoor Cycling, Yoga, Core, Strength, Dance, Rowing, Treadmill Walking, Treadmill Running, and Mindful Cooldown

Weather

Air-quality health recommendations are now provided at specific air-quality levels for the United States, UK, Germany, India, and Mexico. Air-quality data is now available for specific locations in China and Germany.

Shortcuts get stealthy

Shortcuts won’t take over the whole screen when switching to a launched app, you just see a little banner.

TV app gets better

Pleasingly, the new TV app include a new TV_+ tab to help you find and watch Apple Original shows. It also has enhanced search so you can browse by category such as genre, and see recent searches and suggestions as you type, and top results to make it easier to find stuff.

Plant trees when you search

Apple has added Ecosia as a new search engine choice in Safari. That’s great. Now you can dump data-devouring Google in favor of Ecosia, an engine that gets its results from Bing and plants a tree on your behalf each time you make 45 search requests. They’ve planted over 100 million so far.

Fixing the bugs

The release fixes a selection of bugs, including a fix for the widely discussed missing messages problem.

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